


Erlösung

by sevendials



Category: Weiß Kreuz
Genre: Dark, Humiliation, M/M, Sexual Violence, Strong Language, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2007-04-21
Updated: 2007-11-29
Packaged: 2018-02-06 22:51:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1875453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevendials/pseuds/sevendials
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ken isn't in Japan any more. Trapped at the mercy of a powerful psychopath, his team gone and his only ally as much a prisoner as he is, he discovers he has far more left to lose than he could ever have imagined.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. friendly fire

**Author's Note:**

> Standard Disclaimer: _Weiss Kreuz_ and all associated characters and assets remain the property of Kyoko Tsuchiya, Koyasu Takehito, Project Weiss, TV Tokyo, Movic and any other individuals or companies whom I may have inadvertently left out. This is a fan work from which no profit is being made or will be made, written solely for the amusement of anyone who may wish to read it and of course myself, as it’s author.
> 
> Author’s notes: An attempt, if not a terribly high-minded one, at an AT fic, set toward the end of _Strafe_ – the point at which I deviate (quite wildly) from the canon timeline should be obvious from the start. Familiarity with the events of the _Verbrechen_ and _Strafe_ OAVs and the characters who can be found therein would definitely be helpful as I have a sneaking suspicion the opening won’t necessarily make an awful lot of sense without it, but if anyone out there who hadn’t seen the OAVs wanted to read the fic anyway I’d be delighted so what do I know? Incidentally, this fic is not destined to be particularly pleasant either. If you’re looking for a nice story written by a nice person, you’d be well advised to go and read something else (which didn’t have General Powell in).
> 
> Warnings: This story is suitable for mature readers only. Major character deaths, spoilers for _Verbrechen_ and _Strafe_ and strong language from the start: dark adult content from Chapter Two.

Because this is the way they punish the deserter. This is the worst of it, worse than the sentence, than knowing you are doomed to die: when they come for you (and they always come, in the end) they send your friends to do the job. That way it gets done quick and clean and, above all else, it gets done right. 

Who would want to see a friend suffer?

It’s finished. All of a sudden it’s over and he doesn’t want to have won, he doesn’t want to have won at all; here’s Ken on his knees in the snow with the claws of his bugnuks thrust up beneath Aya’s ribcage. He smells copper and sweat and Aya’s terror and, how weird, the faintest hint of cigarettes and he never, absolutely never figured Aya for a smoker, he can feel the quickening of Aya’s heartbeat through the blades and the sudden surge of something over his hands. Even through the worn leather of the gloves it makes his hands feel warm and sticky. Ken doesn’t think he’s ever felt more like a murderer.

If he looks up – penance begins here: he forces himself to, he has to see – there’s Aya’s face, lips parted, eyes wide and shocked. Nothing else, not yet. He’s seen that look a thousand times before, but never on Aya. Ken can tell the pain hasn’t hit yet. He knows Aya hasn’t really understood that he is going to die and Ken would give anything to be there instead…

He isn’t. It’s Aya who slips backward, muscles turning to water; it’s Aya who falls. Lands heavily in settling snow already scuffed by footprints, stained with rosettes of blood. Aya. It’s Aya who is dying; Ken lives on. All Ken can do is drag himself slowly and painfully back to his feet (shivering and suddenly acutely aware of the biting cold, the pain that wracks his body when he tries to stand, his own overwhelming exhaustion) and watch.

It’s only unthinking instinct that’s carried him this far.

But it’s over and already his panic feels distant and dreamlike. Already he hardly remembers fighting and he can’t think why he should have fought so hard. Ken doesn’t want life at any cost.

He waits for a curse, for something about the sister, a message to carry or something hideously banal about safe-deposit boxes or trust funds— they don‘t come. Aya only smiles and his smile is like the Madonna’s, he smiles at nothing and it chills Ken's blood. Aya is saying, I didn’t think you’d be the one to beat me, and there’s something like respect in eyes already grown dulled and distant. Now, only now does Aya see him as an equal and not a junior partner; an irritation at best, at worst a liability. Ken almost laughs. He wants to punch Aya. Aya, you _stupid_ shit, do you really think it works like that? It’s not a game. You don’t get to try it again…

Youji – and good God! it was fitting; why else would your best friend be your executioner? – languid Youji, always last up, always late home, cool and unhurried in everything he does, has surrendered with uncharacteristic haste to his own end. He, lying still and silent and face-down in a slowly spreading pool of his own cooling blood, must have slipped away while Ken struggled with Aya for his life. Flakes of snow have already settled in the folds of his coat, in his tumbled hair. Omi, held upright by the cocoon of wire Youji ensnared him with, is dying: Akira, of course, was dead before any of this began. Now Aya, the smile guttering and fading, lets his eyes fall closed.

But Ken lives on.

Don’t go, Ken wants to say. Don’t, oh God don’t leave me here, don’t leave me alone. And, I'm sorry. I never meant for this to happen. I never wanted any of this… words. They get stuck in his throat. He can’t find the words, he’s never been good with them and what good are words when his teammates lie dead at his feet?

Soon Ken will weep for them, but not now. Now he simply screams.

He doesn’t remember falling to his knees. He doesn’t feel the tears as they spill, unchecked, down his cheeks. He doesn’t know how long he kneels in the stained and bloodied snow, his eyes wide, staring into nothing. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be doing. He doesn’t know what to do. There must be something. He must have known. He wouldn’t have fought for nothing; there would have been a plan. There must have been something he – there would have been some meaning, surely – surely there would have been something worth dying for. Worth killing for. He must have had some idea of where to go from here: he… no. The long term he would have left, as he always did, to Omi and Omi—

Omi is dead. It seems impossible. Unthinkable, but he forces himself to think it. Omi is dead. Omi Tsukiyono, his friend, his oldest companion, a boy who was hope and life, God dammit, _life_ : that boy is dead.

Omi. And Youji, and Aya too and he never thought of Aya as someone who could ever die still less as someone he would outlive, whose life he could ever have taken; they’re all dead. Words, words, empty and meaningless – Ken can’t understand them, can’t even begin to comprehend what the words might mean; realization is an iceberg. It’s too vast to see, too slippery to grasp, he founders on it.

Ken feels, once again, hysteria creeping up on him and he has to bite back the scream. He raises one hand to his mouth to keep himself together, and the stench of his friends’ blood on his gauntlets makes him gag. Suddenly repelled, he strips the bugnuks from his hands and hurls them away from him, he never wants to see them again, he no longer cares if they lead the authorities right back to him. I’ll fight anyone for the sake of the people I believe in, he’d said, and at the time he’d meant it; does he ever say things he doesn’t mean? But he never meant for this to happen.

I’ve changed my mind, he thinks. I never meant this.

Ken is lost.

And they come. A ghost army stealing from the snow and shadows where they have waited, still and silent and patient, only for an ending. Distracted, Ken hears nothing. Sees nothing until, finally, even he can ignore them no longer.

Ah, stupid, he thinks dispassionately when finally he feels the weight of the strangers’ presence, and raises his head, and freezes, trapped by the weight of their eyes. Stupid to miss what was so obvious, to fail to realize they would have stayed. Stupid not to search them out, before all this began…. In Ken's business mistakes always get paid for, one way or another.

Weiss couldn’t have gone on beating the odds.

He lashes out when they come for him, instinctively swiping with one bare hand at the man who snatches for his upper arm, but the blow is a feeble one and doesn’t connect. He struggles and momentarily manages to break free when they yank him bodily to his feet but, ensnared by agony, numbed by the piercing cold and his own bitter despair, he is only utterly vulnerable. Ken doubles over when one of them punches him in the solar plexus, the breath knocked out of him as pain recalls him to pain. He’s still after that, his head hanging forward, slumping in the arms of the men who hold him upright. He lets them twist his arms painfully behind him and cuff his hands behind his back, lets them drag him away. He’s off his guard, overwhelmed, desperately outnumbered: worst of all he doesn’t care. Not about what happens to him. Not any more.

Ken doesn’t want to fight, to kill; he can’t see the point. There’s nobody left to save but himself, and Ken long since stopped worrying about him.

In the distance, caught and carried by the chill night wind, he thinks he can hear the sound of sirens.  
____

It’s over by the time the first cars reach the scene, in a cacophony of banshee sirens and squealing tires and the sudden report of slamming doors. The newcomers can feel it in the air, in the heavy silence; they can tell they have arrived too late. Nothing moves. Just wind and drifting flakes of snow, a shattered door swinging loose on its hinges, the quiet rustle and snap of fabric fluttering in the breeze.

It’s over: or nearly so.

There is nothing to see: or nearly nothing. Just the fairground, baroque and banal. The rides, strangely insubstantial behind their veil of snow. And the scars of bullets, and the blood spattered obscenely across once-garish paintwork, now time-muted and sadly peeling.

A pair of scuffed, bloodied leather gauntlets with shattered steel claws and no apparent owner; Exhibit A. A katana with a worn, blood-smeared blade. A crossbow. A palmtop computer tucked away in a ruined pavilion, playing and playing a single sound clip; a woman’s soft, frightened voice, rendered tinny and distorted by the machine’s speakers, repeating a name and a one-word plea: _Help, Omi-kun. Help, Omi-kun. Help_ … repeating, and repeating, and repeating until all the sense is bled from her words and they become as nothing, a thin thread of meaningless sound, a plea from someone who could be anyone addressed to somebody who has become nobody.

A boy, a puppet hanging limp in his own tangled strings.

A young man, his once-vital body twisted and broken and shattered, torn with bullets.

The redhead, pale lips twisted into the ghost of a smile: perversely serene.

Over: or nearly so. He lies silent, still, on his front in a slowly spreading pool of his own cooling blood; his tumbled, blood-brushed hair, damp with snow, clings to the contours of his cheeks. His breath is the faintest whisper of warmer air against the exposed wrist of the man who bends to him, checking for life he hardly expects to find. His pulse, beneath the strong, competent fingers that grope for it, struggles thin and weak and frantic – fading, fading and fighting against it. _One two one two one two_ —

And the crackle of a radio, the nod of a bowed head, hurrying footsteps. Sometimes, even the best of friends will get it wrong.

_Nothing to see_ , the policemen say, again and again and again. _It’s over. Move along there. Move along_.  
____

The soldiers push him forward simply because they can. Because Ken (his vision swimming, on his feet only because they hold him there) can’t keep up with them and has to so he stumbles, and pulls back on the arms that grasp his own, and nearly falls, and they force him onward with rough blows to the back and calves with fists and boots and rifle butts that send him staggering again, and taunt him in a language he only half understands, though he understands only too well that they are taunting him. Not knowing what they are saying to him makes it worse, somehow.

He can’t think why he’s still alive and almost wishes he wasn’t. If they (whoever they are) are sparing him, it’s only because they want something from him; he can’t even begin to imagine what, now that there’s nothing left. Ken knows that should frighten him.

He knows they’re behind the fence. That should frighten him, too.

Ken stumbles again as they try to lead him up a shallow staircase, losing his footing, and the soldier holding him under the right arm spits a curse in his ear and pulls him forward anyway; if he doesn’t walk they’ll drag him and some last spark of pride and defiance says, they can’t do that. Good Christ, if the others saw him like this, if _Aya_ — he can’t finish the thought, he cringes from it, but _Weiss don’t give up_ and that’s enough, that’s enough to have him grit his teeth and raise his head and stumble onward. Ken is all there is now, and if he gives up then they have truly failed.

It’s such a stupid thing to take pride in. Such a stupid thing to do, to cling to a name. His team is dead. It can’t matter what Ken does, now – but what else is he supposed to do?

He keeps his head up as they walk into a long, shadow-veiled room, all dormant monitors and banks of softly humming computers and the shadows of men, still and blank-faced as statues. He doesn’t glance about himself; he won’t give them the satisfaction of knowing he’s curious. Ken hopes he looks angry.

“Siberian,” she says quietly.

Pale and furious and incongruously immaculate; her features, for all the flawless makeup, tight and pinched. Manx. Manx, her hands cuffed before her, a rifle to her back. She’s as plainly a prisoner as Ken is, but of who? How long has she been here? Has she been here – the thought is too frightening to contemplate. Ken simply stares at her as if he’s never seen her before. What on Earth is Manx doing here, trapped behind the wire?

The sickest thing about it is that he’s pleased to see her.

“Manx, what—?”  
Manx looks away from him. She can’t meet Ken’s eyes. She says only, “They were fakes.”

Ken closes his eyes to hide the tears. The breath seems to stick in his throat. Fakes— then Weiss died for nothing.

“How touching,” says General Powell.

Ken starts, his dark eyes snapping open again as he stares into nothing at all. At first, he sees nothing. The stranger is biding his time, visible only as a slight thickening of the shadows at the far end of the room. When, finally, he condescends to slip into view, stepping into the inadequate light cast by the flickering screens that surround him, Ken can tell he does it only because he has tired of the game. There is no reason why Ken shouldn’t see him now. Powell is smiling.

He isn’t at all what Ken was expecting. He doesn’t know what he was expecting; he never does, he merely knows that they’re always a disappointment when you see them in the flesh, the – and Persia’s stupid storybook phrases never seem right either, when they stand there in front of you, cringing or blustering or furious or smugly denying that they could owe the same debt to mortality as their victims – the dark beasts. They’re just people then, ordinary people: ordinary feels all wrong though, too, in the context of this specimen. This man (tall even by Caucasian standards, slick, case-hardened yet still handsome, his chiseled features softened by a boyish, rebellious forelock), is anything but ordinary. He smiles, and his smile is dangerous. Predatory.

Ken feels the man’s eyes, eyes that shine bright and moist in the half-light, heavy upon him: it was this man, he understands, who wanted him taken alive. Powell’s gaze, as it sweeps across him, is assessing. Calculating. There’s something sick about it, something speculative. His eyes make Ken feel unclean.

“Hm,” Powell says after an uncomfortable moment has passed. “Ken Hidaka, isn’t it? I must say you’ve surprised me. I was rather expecting the redhead, or the little boy with the crossbow, perhaps… Omi, I believe his name was.” Again, there’s speculation in his voice; it’s as if he sees in Ken's surprising endurance a pet project unaccountably derailed.  
Ken can’t explain why, but the knowledge this man expected him to die convenient leaves him feeling – he can’t define it; what is he feeling? Angry, insulted for his team and for himself, perversely almost proud. “Sorry for surviving, then,” he says tersely, feigning a defiance he’s a long way from feeling, and bridles in the face of Powell’s amused, indulgent smile. No, Dark Beast is about right for this one.  
“Stubborn. Yes, I think I see why I ended up with you.” Powell smiles without humor and glances briefly and disinterestedly across at Manx. He says, and he sounds like a benevolent father bestowing a great favor on a sullen, uncooperative daughter who has done nothing to deserve such grace (see, how magnanimous I can be when the mood strikes!), “Your pet, Miss Manx, gets a reprieve.”

Manx doesn’t speak, but she starts, her chin lifting and her eyes widening – slightly, just slightly, but enough: a subtle betrayal of her own horror. She knows far better than to hope Powell might fail, somehow, to notice. That he would have had Ken, or anyone, dragged here in manacles with a gun to his back simply for the sake of proving that hope was dead, so he could kill him in front of her, leaves her disgusted.

(And she is not a sentimental woman but, momentarily, she thinks of a cheerfully crowded little corner store and the heavy smell of pollen and a young man declaring proudly that all a girl’s character can be read through her ankles – her ankles, for heaven’s sake…)

But that he’s changed his mind… what might that mean for Ken? For the both of them?

“Oh,” Ken says, in a small, flat voice Manx hasn’t heard him use in years, “don’t put yourself out for my sake.”

Hard to tell who is the most surprised by Ken’s words: oh, God, Siberian, not you too! Though the look on his face, half guilt, half frank dismay at his own unthinking imprudence, says he didn’t mean to speak at all, still less to say something so recklessly self-annihilating, Manx can tell he must have been hoping to sound defiant, as if he is throwing down a challenge: go on, do your worst, I don’t care any more… He doesn’t. Ken – _okay, I’ll do it_ – Ken just sounds familiar: young and scared and miserable and hopelessly out of his depth. What’s my other choice?

Thank God, Powell just looks at him in surprise, and laughs in his face. Laughs and shakes his head as if at the antics of an exasperating but much-loved child, still every inch the indulgent father, and then gestures to someone still half-hidden in the shadows, beckoning them forward.

In truth, the last few minutes has seen Manx forgetting her almost entirely. For Ken, her presence is merely another unpleasant surprise in a night which has held so many unpleasant surprises that they’re becoming a matter of course; further confirmation, as if such confirmation could be anything other than utterly gratuitous, of how completely Weiss have been outmaneuvered. Ken can barely bring himself to look at her – a slender girl in yellow pajamas and a dead boy’s jacket, her eyes beyond fear, towered over by a pair of soldiers who seem easily twice her size. She is not restrained; they must know there is no need. What did any of this have to do with her? Oh, she knew better than poor Reina and the other girls she’d duped, she was well aware this was no game, but she’d had no idea just how serious things were…

Kaori is little more than an emblem of their failure.

—he can’t, Manx thinks uselessly, and she knows how pointless it is even to think it. He can’t do that!

But of course he can, and he will. They’re not in Japan any more. She sees it all. Understanding shears through her thoughts clear and sharp and painful to the touch as a shard of broken glass – the minute Kaori is led into the light Manx realizes that Powell is going to kill her. Kaori, for Powell, was little more than a lure, the bait in the trap; she was taken only to serve as an added incentive for Weiss to turn on one another, something for Omi to fight for over and above mere survival. A failsafe, just in case life alone wasn’t enough – and it worked. It worked only too well.

Now? There is nothing left to fight for. Weiss is finished: Aya, Youji and Omi lie dead; Ken, bloodied and used up and barely holding together, is a prisoner. And Kaori Hibana has outlived her use.

Manx sees it all; what does Kaori see? The girl stands mute, trembling and ashen between her solemn, blank-faced guards, her delicate features frozen so as to resemble a clumsily-carved mask, caught in a snarl of desperate confusion and fear so overwhelming it seems almost parodic. Only her eyes, huge and dark and shadowed, still move, darting mayfly-frantic from face to face as if she were searching for something and finding no hope, no comfort, no way out. Nothing at all. The soldiers, to a man, look through her; the woman’s eyes are full of a terrible, hopeless compassion; Ken is a study in guilt.

“I’m sorry,” he says, when he feels Kaori’s eyes upon him.

Kaori flinches at the sound of his voice, and quickly looks away. Don’t apologize, she wants to say. Don’t make me believe this is real – she can’t speak; her mouth is too dry, she can’t seem to make her lips move. The words get caught in her throat. If a man like Ken has been forced to admit to defeat, and she can’t think what else his apology might portend, there truly is no hope for any of them… so Kaori looks away, because to be forced to see Ken like this (slumped, exhausted, between the two soldiers who hold him on his feet, his clothing torn and blood-spattered, eyes dull with pain and dragging grief) strikes her as somehow obscene.

And meets Powell’s gaze only by accident, and gasps, and tries to tear her eyes away and can’t. Kaori is prey, a shy night creature trapped in the sudden glare of headlights, unable to move, to think, to do anything but stare hopelessly into the light and wait for the end. The gun in his hand is almost an afterthought.

The General simply raises his hand, and smiles: his smile is not for Kaori, but for Ken. “How remarkably sentimental of you, Siberian.”

(You weren’t my first choice, but I think you’ll do.)

Then the shot.


	2. prisoner of war

When he closes his eyes, Ken can see them dying.

The General fires twice. Two shots in quick succession, one shattering Kaori’s ribs and piercing her heart, one tearing into an eye socket and punching a hole through the back of her skull, both delivered neat as an executioner. A quick death; almost, for all the blood and the bone and the matter, a tidy one. It is over before her body has finished falling, but she would have known it was happening. Ken is not yet twenty; this is last four years of his life; he is sure she would have felt it for all that Powell had no interest in her pain.

(It’d be Hell living like this, anyway, Youji had said, and he’d smiled at him as if he were glad: why, Ken wonders, did I have to fight so hard?)

He doesn’t know what he wants for them now. Maybe nothing at all; a moment of pain, mercifully curtailed, and then limitless silence and calm. That sounds good enough. He knows, though, that if it was true and there is something else, he doesn’t want them to be hurting. Let them be free of pain: Ken believes just enough to know he has no right to hope for that. Not for his team, and certainly not for himself. If God lives, Weiss is damned – Akira too, and Kaori. We thought it was a game—

You can't worry about the dead, Ken, his father had said impatiently: with a wife newly buried and a young family to support, a dangerously depressed child was just another worry he didn't need and was in no state to deal with. He'd been perfectly right - why worry about what won't change? What was gone was gone.

But Ken lives on and can still be made to suffer.

Why does it then feel selfish, to fear for himself? Why does he feel he has no right to be afraid?

Powell lowers the gun and tucks it back inside his tailored jacket, calm and careful as ever. He might have done nothing more than swat a mosquito. There’s something calculated about such understatement, an almost theatrical air to his movements, his gestures: Powell must know how intently he is being watched. Nothing else moves. Even Kaori’s guards haven’t so much as flinched, though the girl they were watching over lies dead at their feet, her skull shattered and her body slowly leaking blood.

Checkmate. What happens now?

Powell says only, “Dispose of that, and take the woman away.”   
“Sir.” One of Manx’s guards.  
“She is not to be harmed. I may have further use for her. As for the boy—” A pause, as if for thought. An understated nod in Ken's direction. “Search him, then bring him to my office.”

He doesn’t explain what for, but he doesn’t have to. It doesn’t matter what he might want with Ken; orders are orders and it’s enough for these men that the General wants him at all. Powell turns to the door and hurries from the room as if there are other, more important matters he should be dealing with and he has dallied quite long enough over tonight’s little entertainment, diverting though it has proved: he doesn’t even glance back at them, but he doesn’t have to do that either. Manx he no longer needs, and Ken he will see soon enough.

(Why? There’s nothing left to take – Ken isn’t sure even he believes that. Not now. He takes a breath, holds it, releases. He fights for calm. Count to ten, his father had said, once upon a time… They already know you’re frightened, Hidaka. The last thing you need to do is prove it.)

“Ken,” Manx says: just that.

Her guards thrust her from the room. She struggles: she twists in their grasp and kicks out and one of them curses at her in English and she pretends his words mean nothing. She yanks her head back, searching for Ken. Her hair is in her face. Manx meets his gaze for a fraction of a second and her eyes say nothing to him but _stay alive_.

And then the hands of his own captors are tightening about his arms and he is hauled away from the body of the girl Omi died trying to protect. His guards force him back down the shallow stairway and back out into the corridor: the brightness of the lighting makes him squint. This time, when he stumbles, Ken can’t seem to find his feet, and after a while he stops trying. He simply slumps in the arms of the soldiers and lets them drag him onward, into a service elevator, with a broken floor gauge and battered beige paneling. Ken stares at the floor, watching in dazed fascination as his blood drips onto the scuffed linoleum. His limbs are aching, the manacles nag him, biting at the skin of his wrists, the wound in his shoulder throbs; he can’t seem to focus and can’t imagine why he’s still conscious.

The soldiers talk over him, speaking in English: one of them says something that makes his comrade laugh nastily, and Ken knows that they are laughing at him. It hardly seems to matter.

Ken is cursorily searched in a reception area: these men know he is no threat at all. One of his guards rifles his pockets and roughly runs a practiced hand across the contours of his body, without discovering anything more incriminating than a square of gauze and a bit of lint, or anything more dangerous than door keys. They take his goggles, they remove his boots and socks then lead him, barefoot and bewildered, into a wide, well-furnished office, its windows offering a sweeping view out across the huddled buildings of the night-dark base. Snow blows in flurries across an empty parade ground; a sentry shivers by a gate, huddling into the collar of his coat.

Powell is already there, stood with one hand resting against his desk, a benevolent dictator’s smile on his face. His gaze sweeps down Ken's body like he was just another commodity, and his eyes are as dispassionately appraising as those of a housewife at the butcher’s, sizing up a joint of meat. He nods briskly. (Yes, you’ll do.)

“Leave us,” he says, and the soldiers’ hands drop from Ken's upper arms; they salute smartly and he hears them slip silently away, quietly closing the door behind them. Ken thinks he hears the scrape of a key in a lock. Then footsteps in the corridor, American voices, another brash young man’s laugh, like something from an undubbed war movie. The soldiers know what he is here for.

Ken, for them, is nothing but a barrack-room joke.

He is beginning to understand. (No. No, he can’t. He’s a General, he can’t possibly—) He is alone with Powell, and already he is bound and bleeding.

Effectively helpless. He doesn’t know what to do: it is impossible for him to believe there might be nothing. Ken is caught on the expectation that he can save himself and how? (It’s wrong. It’s got to be wrong.) His hands are cuffed behind him; his feet are bare. How can he, when it is an effort to so much as stay on his feet, now that there’s nobody to hold him there?

From Manx’s pet to General Powell’s.

And all Powell does is watch him and wait – and what for, God damn it? What does Powell think he’s waiting for? His gaze is an obscenity, it leaves Ken feeling stained. He doesn’t trust himself to speak. He knows he’ll sound frightened and hopeless, he knows his voice will be hoarse. He knows that whatever he says it will be wrong. Ken knows, too, that he is going to speak anyway because he can’t stand the silence and doesn’t want to wait: he would rather anything happened than nothing did. Powell’s calm is just another weapon, one which he is helpless against.

“Is this it, then?” Ken hears himself saying: it could have been a minute later, it could have been as many as twenty. Shut up, he thinks. _Shut up_ , you idiot. “Is that why you did all this? To get—”

He can’t finish the sentence. The words get stuck in his throat. That’s what he’s after, Ken. This man wants (oh God, no) to fuck you. What are you going to do about it?

“To get laid?” Powell chuckles briefly and indulgently. The words, on his lips, sound quite ridiculous: from any other middle-aged man, standing tall and spry in his nice tailored suit in the middle of his nice big office, it might well have made Ken smile, but here on his own territory General Powell is not even remotely amusing. “Of course not. You’re a fringe benefit. But what else am I supposed to do with you?”  
“You could kill me,” Ken says: mere wishful thinking.  
Powell simply smiles. Somehow, it is worse than if he had screamed at him. “Oh, I’m sure I will, in time.” It isn’t a threat, merely a statement. He says, apropos of nothing at all, “What’s your name?”

He knows it. Powell has called Ken by name once already. He asks again only because he can; his face registers no surprise at all when Ken fails to answer, not even to offer him a lie.

It starts too soon. Ken knows what he is here for just as clearly as Powell does but he was expecting camouflage, however perfunctory: questions perhaps, a poor parody of an interrogation or a thrown punch. It starts with a touch that is anything but casual, with a hand on the shoulder, grasping just the slightest bit too hard. Ken winces and recoils, scowling. He aims a kick at Powell’s legs – back off, bastard – but misses; he stumbles slightly, loses his footing. His vision swims like the world caught in water, the floor seems to give a sudden sick lurch beneath him and he almost falls, but Powell is there, and Powell catches him. Hands about his waist, again that one bit too tight: he pulls against them. Hears metal striking metal as he struggles against his handcuffs, wrists twisting against the manacles that encircle them, _you can’t let this happen_ —

“Let go,” Ken says: a catch there, something tremulous and uncertain in his voice. Already he sounds breathless. (What’s the matter? Forgotten how to fight?)  
“Stop that,” Powell says sharply, “you’ll hurt your wrists.”

He hears Powell shift slightly, stooping. One of the man’s hands slips insinuatingly down his thighs and it is all Ken can do to suppress a shudder. He wants to run, to fight, and knows he can do neither. He’s too hurt to walk unaided, there’s nowhere and no one for him to run to. (Weiss are dead, Ken. You killed them.) He wants to curse Powell, to demand the man get off, stop touching me; he opens his mouth to protest and his feet are swept from under him and he is in Powell’s arms – he cries out, wordlessly, and doesn’t even manage to sound indignant. Ken is cradled against Powell’s chest like a woman or a child, but his grasp is hard enough to hurt. Ken’s arms are pinned against his sides, his thighs pressed tightly together. _Stop it_.

Oh, Jesus. Jesus Christ, he’s strong. Ken tries to struggle and finds he can barely even move; he tries to kick and strikes nothing but air. This one would be difficult enough fully-armed and uninjured, never mind now. He wants to fuck you, Kenken, and you’re going to let him, because there’s nothing else to do.

“ _Asshole_! You’re gonna regret this, let go!”  
“Oh yes?” Powell sounds amused. Ken can’t see his face, but he is sure the man is smiling. I doubt it, Weiss. I doubt that very much.

The desk: Powell lays him down on it, gentle as a father putting a sleeping child to bed. If Ken turns his head, he can see a name plate, engraved with English letters, and the edge of a photograph frame. Powell sits on the edge of the desk, obscenely casual, then bends over him, holding him against the wood with one hand pressed hard against his chest. Ken shifts uneasily beneath him. He wonders inanely if Powell can feel his heart beat and, if so, if he can tell it is racing.

Let’s do this the easy way. _No_.

“I’m going—” He pushes against Powell’s hand, pushing up with his elbows, back arching and forearms flat against the wood behind him – feels the wound in his shoulder shriek in painful protest, and a gout of blood surge down his arm. “—to fucking kill you! Let me _go_ , you _bastard_!”  
“Feel better?” Powell asks. Now that’s off your chest, boy…  
“Fuck you!”  
“I’ll take that as a no, then.” Frowning, just for a moment: a look of grandfatherly disappointment. He looked almost dismayed, as if he had been expecting something different. Yes, stubborn. Too bad.

And reaches down and, working one-handed, casually undoes Ken's jeans. The button pops free, the zip unfastens with a single harsh rasp. Ken starts, head jerking back and eyes going wide as Powell (no, oh, Jesus Christ no) slips one hand inside his pants, fingers insinuating themselves beneath the waistband of his underwear. He gasps audibly as he feels the man’s fingers closing about him, gently rubbing against him, feels a flush creeping to his cheeks – _no_. No! No, it’s wrong, it’s all wrong, it shouldn’t _be_ like this, he can’t let this happen, has to move, _has to get free_ —

Ken thinks – how can he not? – of Youji: propped up on one elbow, half-hidden behind a veil of darkness. Jesus Kenken, he says, sensitive much? Then he smiles, showing his teeth. He even laughs briefly, soft and low and breathy. Ken wonders what he must have said to him; he can’t remember that. I never, Youji says, said it was a bad thing…

(I never meant to kill him.)

“ _Bastard_!”

He shrieks it. Frantic, furious, he pushes away from the table, forcing back Powell’s hand: this time Ken manages to sit. Lunges forward and – wants to punch that smug, sick little smile, to smash the man’s face until it’s bloody and distorted, and so swollen it doesn’t look like anything any more. Ken wants to make this man hurt for what he’s done to Weiss, for what he’s doing to him. His hands are still bound and it barely seems relevant. Catches Powell in the side with a raised knee, more by accident than anything, but it isn’t enough. Nothing could be payment enough for what this man has already done.

Powell turns, spitting an obscenity and reaching for his shoulders: Ken has seconds, he can’t fight but he has to. Powell’s shoulder presses against his jaw and Ken bites it.

He bites down hard until he tastes blood. Until he hears Powell yell something in English, feels the hand between his legs tightening about him, squeezing and twisting until he wrenches his head back and hears himself shrieking high and thin and pained: the cry is torn from him. Then a hand on his forehead, thick fingers twisting in his tangled hair, holding him upright – Powell’s face is suffused with fury and for a second Ken wishes he was smiling again, then the man punches him in the solar plexus, knocking the breath from his body. Ken gags; he very nearly vomits. He is still struggling to draw breath when his head is slammed back against the desk. The impact is hard enough to leave him dazed and dizzy, to make the room swim before him and his vision fade to gray. 

Powell shouts again, again in English; Ken can’t quite catch the words. No doubt he is cursing him.

A blow to the face, then another. Pain takes root, budding and blooming across his jaw, his left cheek. Ken bites down on his lip to keep himself from crying out, then feels Powell’s hands back on his hips. Feels him groping for the waistband of his underwear – fucking _bastard_! – dragging it off along with his jeans. 

Ken blushes again, furiously. He hears himself saying, “No.” (I’m gonna kill you. Don’t do this.)

His sweater and tee-shirt are torn open, ripped from him equally unceremoniously and cast to the floor, leaving him lying naked on the desktop, the varnished wood cool against his skin, and already slightly sticky with blood. Ken can feel the metal edge of the general’s blotter digging into his back and he draws his knees together, shifting uneasily. He has nowhere to run, he has given up on fighting, but he wishes there were somewhere he could hide. Powell frowns, roughly forces Ken’s legs apart, then steps back and gazes down at him, his eyes as coolly assessing as any anatomy student’s, a derisive smirk twisting the corners of his lips. Already Ken knows better than to try and move. He simply lies wounded and exposed while Powell rapes him with his eyes.

Powell says, “What’s your name, boy?”  
“You know my name,” Ken says. His voice sounds like a stranger’s.  
“I want to hear it from you. Will you tell me your name?”

Ken says nothing. He merely averts his eyes, gazing blankly through the windows at the snow, still falling in anarchic flurries, and shivers sinuously. He tells himself it is only from cold.

Movement: the rasp of fabric on fabric. The sound of a closet door creaking open, then clicking closed. Powell is slipping off his tailored jacket, no doubt placing it neatly on a hanger. He unfastens his belt, he loosens his tie, just a little; it gives him something of the air of an overgrown schoolboy. Powell walks back over to the desk and perches back on the edge of it, gazing at Ken over his shoulder. (And blood on his shirt, just a little.) It is as if he can’t quite work out why there should be a naked boy on his desk, and is wondering what to do with him.

Powell reaches for him again, and Ken flinches. Tries to draw his knees together; once again Powell parts them. There are hands upon him, and those hands are now only terrifyingly gentle. He is being caressed, coaxed into receptiveness. Ken hears himself gasp: soft, fractured sound – no. This isn’t happening. Stop.

(Sick fuck – what the Hell does he think he’s _doing_?) “No,” Ken says again, louder this time. “Stop.”  
“You don’t mean that.” Powell says. Just relax.

No. Not like this. _Stop_. Ken clings to his pain. He thinks of Aya, gazing at him in bewilderment as the claws of his bugnuks rip him apart inside. Of Youji falling to his knees and smiling and Omi, dying for the sake of a lie at the hands of two men he had forlornly believed he could call friends. (Why couldn’t I save him?) Ken doesn’t understand. He never meant to kill them, never meant any of this. Powell’s palm rubs against him, working him until he’s flushed and panting for breath, his body dappled with sweat and Ken wishes he had never fought at all, wishes Aya had killed him, that he’d stood and waited and said only, make it quick. He fights against arousal, teeth gritted, his eyes half-open and gazing into nothing. I don’t want this.

He probably deserves no less. Ken closes his eyes and sees his friends dying.

“What’s your name?” Powell murmurs, like a lover. His hand stills for a second.  
Ken whimpers. He arches up into the touch, his eyes opening again. _Why did he_ —No. No! Please, dear God, don’t let him make me want this. “Jesus, _please_ —”  
“Your name.” Powell drags a slow finger up Ken's chest, smiling at the way he shivers. The touch burns. “That’s all I want. Just tell me your name.”  
(Please stop.) “Ken.” The word is caught and carried on a gasp. _Bastard_.  
“What was that?” Slowly, Powell starts to rub against Ken again, teasing him with the tip of one finger; his other hand presses down against the boy’s chest, the ball of one thumb resting atop one of his nipples, gently grazing against already painfully sensitized flesh. Biting his lip, Ken struggles desperately, futilely, to choke back a moan. Why do it like this? Why can’t he just – why is he making me _like_ this? “Tell me your name.”  
“Ken!” Oh, God. You’ve lost and you know it. “My name is Ken!”  
Powell smiles at him, all benign benevolence. “Good. You’re learning,” he says.

And gets up, and walks away.

Just walks off, turning his back on Ken – the boy cries out, something that sounds almost like a protest – as if he were of no more interest to him than the blotter he lies on. Abandoning him to his own painful arousal, unasked-for and unwanted, to heightened sensations and damp and tingling skin, and (please no) the ghost of Powell’s hands upon him, his chest, his thighs, sliding against him. (Please, dear God, not this.) He is stimulated, he is humiliated; his cheeks are flushed, his legs bent at the knee, splayed wide. ( _Touch me_ —no goddamnit!) Tears prickling against the backs of his eyes.

He’ll come back. He probably never left – he’ll be just out of sight, just watching. Watching you pant and whimper and want him, and hate yourself for wanting it at all. He’ll be back, once he thinks he’s made his point. Now tell yourself there’s not a part of you that’s glad.

(The body, just that. It can do only what it is programmed to. He – what the Hell’s wrong with you, Hidaka? This guy’s _raping_ you! – can no more stop it than he can stop himself breathing. Ken might as well rail at himself for blinking away dust.)

It’s no lie at all, but it feels like one.

Stop it, he thinks again. Oh God, oh God, please God.

Powell stops make-believing that Ken is irrelevant, gives up on the pretense that he is busy elsewhere. Oh, are you still here? He plays at surprise, raising his brows as if caught off-guard by Ken's bewildering persistence, but the smirk, when he steps back into view, tells his prisoner that he has seen everything. He flushes, then yelps at the feel of Powell’s hands about his waist, dragging him down toward the edge of the desk and, though Ken struggles against him and curses, his struggles lack conviction as well as strength. He can’t even persuade himself he has any right to be saved. His friends are dead and he killed them. Whatever happens next, he clearly deserves it all.

No words now. Just the rasp of a zip and a hand on Ken’s thigh, large and pale against his own darker skin, spreading his legs wider. (Powell bending over him again, teeth scraping against the skin of his neck, hard enough to leave a mark.) Then fingers, slick and slippery, insinuating themselves between his legs, working their way inside. Ken's breath catches in his throat; he gasps audibly, eyes going wide. Tears glistening there, threatening to spill now.

“Fuck, I— _stop it_!”  
Powell laughs, soft and breathy, something felt more than heard. “You’ll have to do a bit better than that.” Wraps his fingers around Ken, and listens as he struggles to choke back a sob.

It doesn’t hurt for long; it’s the absence that makes Ken cry. Pain he could, at least, understand: it would be simple compared to this, to being forced to feel…

(No. Mary Mother of God, not this – and it feels good, doesn’t it? Just relax. The brush of fingertips against his chest, the hand at his waist and the tilt of the hips, sweat pearling up across his brow, his chest and back; his legs tightening about his rapist’s waist, gonna kill him, the fucking _pervert_! The push and the flex of it, and tears on his cheeks and oh Jesus fuck – and need, white-hot and demanding. _Touch me_. Urgency. _No_. Lips parted, hair in his eyes, panting for breath— _no_!)

Not like this. Never like this. He forces himself to think of nothing.

He doesn’t want this. Ken never wanted this: this man bent over him, a hank of hair grazing against one bruised cheek, the tails of an untucked dress shirt brushing his raised thighs. He shudders, revolted, when Powell runs his tongue across the plane of one cheek, tasting his tears.

Ken never meant this, but it hardly seem to matter what he might have meant when his body betrays him so completely – he lets his head fall backward, moans helplessly as Powell shifts against him, pushing forward, pressing in deeper. He arches his back and raises his hips, he writhes beneath Powell’s touches but his cuffed hands are balled into fists, his dark eyes wide and frightened and fixed upon nothing at all. He can feel his pulse racing, feel the tears as they crawl down his cheeks. Powell thrusts two fingers between his parted lips; he can taste sweat and the coppery taint of his own blood, it doesn’t even occur to him to bite. Ken has never met a man who hated him so much.

Breath quickening, eyes falling closed: Ken is moving with him now, hips flexing in time with Powell’s thrusts. Powell’s fingers dragging against him, and him arching up into it, shuddering, drowning in sensation—

Ken cries out: hoarse, inarticulate, pained.

Leaving him – Oh, _God_ – enervated and struggling for breath, his skin sticky with sweat, and with blood. Oh God. He weeps openly and helplessly, vocal as a frightened child, and can’t even cover his face.

Powell’s hips spasm and he spits a hot, forceful curse over him, fingers tightening almost painfully, then his grip slackens. Raising his head from Ken's shoulder, Powell pushes away. Disengaging. The look in his eyes, as he steps from the desk, is detached, dispassionate – almost clinical, the look of a man who has completed some small chore. Fastidiously, he looks for something to wipe himself off with before tugging his pants back up, rearranging his disordered clothing and tightening his tie. His forelock tumbles into his eyes, roguishly; easy to imagine a wife or a girlfriend reaching out to him and pushing it away with a smile, before she reaches for a cigarette or turns out the lamp.

“There now,” Powell says. He wipes a tear from Ken's cheek then ruffles his hair, a perversely paternal gesture. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

Ken barely hears him. Barely senses the hands that touch his face. Lost, drifting, stupefied with terror and despair, and overwhelming exhaustion, he opens distant, tear-glazed eyes and stares blank and uncomprehending at the unremarkable ceiling. Maybe, he thinks, maybe I am dead after all. Maybe this is Hell; maybe there's nothing the Devil can dream up that could possibly compare with more of the same only worse, much worse...

“ _Ave Maria_ ,” he murmurs, uncertain where he is.

And oblivion opens its arms to greet him and he plunges gratefully into it.


	3. collateral damage

The first thing he has is a single sound, soft and repetitive.

Ken opens his eyes on nothing. It is dark, and the darkness lies heavy about him, heavy as earth. Dark and cold and still and maybe he is dreaming, or really has died – yet there is the sound, soft and strange, yet somehow familiar. He can’t place it, he has to strain to hear it: all the same there it is, caught somewhere on the edge of awareness and murmuring softly to him that this is real. It is a nothing, that sound, something that ordinarily he wouldn’t even hear, if he had anything else to anchor him. Here he has nothing but that single steady _tick_ , like clockwork or the regular beat of a metronome, yet it dawdles; it is too muted and too measured to be either.

Water, he realizes after a while. It is the sound of water, as it drips from a leaking tap.

That orientates him. Reality creeps back slow and shamefacedly, as if it knows he will not thank it for its return. It leaves him lying on his side, the floor beneath him unyielding and chill and comfortless, the wall at his back lined with tiles. He is in a kitchen, or a bathroom: he thinks a bathroom. He doesn’t understand. His hair is in his face. 

He is cold, and desperately frightened. He is naked, and bound hand and foot.

It is, Ken supposes, an explanation of sorts.

He thinks of General Powell before he thinks of his friends and it appalls him. The night before comes back to him piecemeal, like a jumbled set of stills from a movie he knows he should remember and cannot – Ken lies on a stranger's desk and Aya looks at him in confusion, feeling nothing and amazed that it should be that simple. His shoulder aches; he feels bruised inside; his body feels foreign, like a heavy and ill-fitting coat. Heavy-limbed inertia, the blurred and sluggish quality to his thoughts, dreadful lassitude and a dry and tainted taste in his mouth: it all hints quietly at the possibility of drugging.

The first instinct is to try to shout. To curse Powell, the darkness and the chill or anything at all; to scream wordlessly for someone, anyone to come and help him – anything at all, as long as it isn't nothing.

So he tries to cry out, and finds he cannot. He merely whimpers, the sound trapped deep in the back of the throat.

Which is when Ken realizes that he has been gagged. A piece of thick fabric has been forced into his mouth, pressing down hard against his tongue to hold it trapped, and spilling out from between his parted lips; he feels as if he is going to retch. A tight feeling across his face tells him a layer of heavy tape has been pressed, entirely unnecessarily, over his mouth. (Who does Powell suppose he will call to? There's nobody left.) Ken tries to scream again, and manages only a low and hopeless moan. Tries to draw breath and nearly chokes. For a single hysterical moment he wonders if he is going to suffocate – _I'm going to kill him_.

(Really. And how do you propose to do that?)

Ken closes his eyes and gazes at the darkness behind his eyelids. Bastard. _Bastard_. Hail Mary full of grace. Concentrates on breathing through his nose, and tries not to think about where he is or what is happening to him. Don't panic. Whatever you do, Ken, don't panic. Panic can kill.

He doesn't know how long he lies there, wounds aching, limbs heavy, listening to the steady tick of the tap and counting his breaths. He sees Youji lying dead in a tangle of bedsheets; handsome, husky Akira torn apart by bullets; the General bending over him, hands ghosting across his chest and slipping between his thighs, _tell me your name_ —Ken closes his eyes and lets himself weep silently, for his friends, for the family he failed, for his own stupid self.

The drug must still be working on him, for he has drifted back into an uncomfortable doze when he hears a key scraping in a lock, and a door creaking open.

General Powell, the light behind him, stands in the doorway in his shirtsleeves, his hands tucked in the pockets of his pants like a much younger man. He smiles, obscenely casual. Ken tries to turn to him, but – what the fuck have they drugged him with? – his body won’t obey him; he tries to move and can barely raise his head. Only his eyes, narrowed against the unexpected light, move, and he gazes up at Powell from their corners: he hopes he only looks angry. Tries to say something, to curse or threaten, or maybe simply to question – manages only to whimper, soft and plaintive and incoherent. Powell smiles at him, and stoops to pat his cheek. Uncaps a syringe, and smirks as Ken's eyes widen. _Fucking bastard_ —

"You’ll have,” Powell says, “to be patient, I’m afraid.”

And jabs the syringe into Ken's upper thigh, presses down the plunger. Why does he feel like he deserves it?

The sick fuck hasn't even taken him out the office. Powell has merely tidied him away, stowed him neatly in a side room: a mildly amusing side project to be dealt with later, provided he isn't too busy. Probably getting off on this, on knowing Ken is near him, unable to so much as cry out, while he goes about his business. No doubt he will be smirking to himself, wondering idly what the day's crop of visitors would think if they knew he had a bound and naked boy in his bathroom, a boy who, a few hours previous, he raped on the desk he now sits behind, smiling and smiling and pretending to listen. Knowing that Ken hates him, and is powerless to do anything about it…

Knowing he is helpless. Ken's eyes slip closed, and he lets the drug take him.

He doesn’t know how long he loses. Hours, he thinks, not that it matters. The next thing Ken knows is voices, talking over him in English, and footsteps, and hands upon his body. He can no longer hear the tick of the tap.

Hands. Soldiers, three of them, strong and casually cruel and none of them all that much older than he is. He doesn’t think they’re the ones from last night. Ken opens his eyes when they touch him, and can see nothing but the bathroom ceiling, the light spilling through the open door and Powell, a shadow on the edge of sight: he tries to pull away from their hands. The flat, bored look in their eyes says that he doesn’t exist. Ken doesn’t know if he’s glad or not.

He is wrapped in a blanket made of rough gray wool and stamped with the Roman letters US; the fabric is coarse and scratchy against his bare skin. The drug heavy upon him, Ken lets his eyes fall closed and lets it happen, lets them believe him safe and submissive: he lets them move away before he tries, more through instinct than any real expectation of success, to struggle free. He manages to fight free of the sheet and is pulling hopelessly at his cuffed wrists as one of them, blank-eyed and sturdy and blonde, turns back to him. The young man curses; he is on Ken in seconds, holding him down while his companions roll him tightly up in the blanket again.

(It is a crazy kind of comfort that Omi will never have to know that this is what his team has come to, already: the boy hasn’t yet been dead a day. Stay alive, Siberian. Just _stay alive_ —)

And that isn’t up to him, either.

This time, the soldiers tape the blanket securely about Ken before they turn their backs on him, leaving him swathed in fabric from his neck to his calves. They fetch in a large wooden packing case, foursquare and solidly constructed, and force him into it, his head bowed and his thighs pressed up tight against his chest, then fasten the lid on him. The locks fasten with a soft, final _click_.

Ken wants to scream, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t even try.

Powell merely watches, without curiosity.

*

Cramp in his limbs, a dull ache about his neck and shoulders: a heavy collar of dragging pain. They have moved him, this much Ken is sure of. He was aware of being lifted, and carried; of being jostled and jarred, then carelessly cast aside. That was – he doesn’t know how long ago it was. It could have been a matter of minutes; it could have been an hour or more. He is aware, somehow, that it is dark outside, dark and cold: the heat and the closeness and the sensation of sweat pearling up across his back hardly seems to matter. The cold is there, on the edge of his awareness. Even if escape were anything but an impossibility, he wouldn’t get far like this. 

He can hear himself breathing, too fast and too shallow, and can tell just by the ragged edge to it that he is close to panic. The air about him is, already, heated and stale, thrice-used. He breathes in sips, shallow and unsatisfying and barely slaking his sudden thirst for air.

He thinks of coffins and of folk tales, of playful virgins on their wedding-nights, trapped by mischance in caskets or in closets and left there to rot. He tells himself, and even the thought feels hysterical, not to be so stupid. You’re not a child, Ken, and this isn’t any kind of fairy story. The resemblance between you and those girls stops at the box—

Jesus fuck. He’s in a box. 

How can it still sound so stupid? He’s tied up and naked and locked in a box and it’s almost fucking funny. He must have been in worse situations, though he can't seem to think of any. You absolutely sure, Hidaka, that you’re not dead?

But dying would have been easy, and Ken never has been one to do things the easy way. He knows he shouldn’t have fought; must have known it even at the time, but he fought anyway. Should, he knows, have let Aya kill him. Or, later, should have let the soldiers do it, should have refused to surrender and pushed them to it, taken a couple of the bastards with him – he knows he couldn’t have done that. He simply hadn’t had the strength. Or earlier: Youji, in the tunnels beneath the hospital, but Youji had let him go. He hadn’t thought, at the time, to wonder why. 

(Because it was Youji. They weren’t really going to kill each other—)

Aya, he remembers, was the one who murdered Omi. (And you – Kenken – you could do nothing to stop him.) If Aya, not he, had been the one left to live, would he have felt sorry?

Powell isn’t interested in him. Not as him.

Not that it makes any difference why he’s here. He is here, and there’s an end to it. What’s going to happen to me?

Heavy footsteps, brash Hollywood voices, three of them – Ken doesn’t know how long he’s been waiting, can’t tell if it’s the three from before and oh Jesus, Jesus Christ where’s this going to end? He wonders what they’re saying; deep down, he knows that it will have nothing to do with him. Someone curses; the crate seems to shudder about him, and his head strikes the side of the crate hard enough to leave him dazed and blinking. A sudden giddy, weightless feeling – Ken tries to shout and manages nothing more than a low and hopeless moan – and he is being lifted, carried, jerked and jounced with every step his captors take. And nothing for him to do but wait, and pray to God that he’s not about to be buried alive.

Ken is thrust from the packing crate as unceremoniously as he was forced into it. The crate is carried indoors and down a steep flight of stairs, a long corridor; too soon the men carrying him stop short. He can hear them complaining to one another as one of them hunts for something in his pockets, hear, beneath their brassy nonsense voices, a key scraping in a stiff, recalcitrant lock. Then a sudden jolt as the men start moving again: the door slams behind them. He wonders where they are, and what lies behind the locked door – patience is a virtue, Kenken, no doubt you’ll find out soon enough. No doubt you won’t like it one bit.

The lid is torn from the crate, catches snapping open as light floods over him: confused, curious in spite of himself, Ken tries to raise his head. Dim though the light is, it dazzles him, leaving him squinting – and then the soldiers upend the crate and tip him out onto the floor. He lands heavily, catching his head on the floor; his injured shoulder takes the worst of it. The scream sticks in his throat.

Clearly, Ken catches himself thinking, the case wasn’t labeled fragile. He almost laughs.

It’s not like the soldiers care. He’s still struggling to catch his breath when one of them bends to him, snatches for a handful of his hair; Ken swears viciously behind his gag and tries to twist away, but his limbs are stiff and the blanket taped about his body catches at him, and he understands that all he is doing is tiring himself out. The soldier grabs him all the same, drags him bodily across the room and drops him atop an old quilt spread out in one corner, and all Ken can do is curse him and even that doesn’t come out right. _Pathetic_.

The soldier rolls him onto his back and crouches over him, pins him to the quilt with a knee on his thighs. Oh, the fucking bastard! Powell won’t like that, the thinks, and wonders why he thought it. Breathe, Ken tells himself. Just breathe—

He wishes they’d speak Japanese.

The other two advance on Ken, bend over him: there are fingers ghosting across the skin of his feet, hands fumbling with the belt that binds his legs and tugging it free: briefly, he considers trying to kick but pain and the drugs hold him immobile. (It’s not what you think it is.) Metal clinks on metal, and something stiff and heavy is strapped about his left ankle. A padlock snaps closed.

Then the soldiers get up, and walk away, closing the door quietly behind them. No, he simply doesn’t exist for them and Ken isn’t sure if that makes things better or far, far worse. It has, he knows, to mean something that the light has been left on: certainly it wouldn’t be for his benefit.

He tries to push himself upright, to grasp for orientation (and as if it matters where you are, Ken!) but his injuries snatch at him when he tries to lift his head, clawing and dragging him back; agony flares behind his eyes in heated, angry scarlet, and he gasps into his gag. Ken feels something hot and damp and heavy seeping into the blankets he has been swathed in, and understands that his shoulder is bleeding again. He is glad of it. He hopes it scars, it’s the least that Aya deserves. So he lies still and silent, bound and gagged and neatly packaged – signed, sealed and delivered, and nothing to do but wait for someone (his owner?) to come and unwrap him, and press him into service. He feels like a parcel.

“I must apologize,” Powell says into the silence, “for the substandard accommodation.”

But it doesn’t surprise Ken to hear him speak. He has known, somehow, that Powell was there all along—promise me, Ken wants to say, that you’ll never open a goddamn hotel. Youji would have done that, played along with an interrogator’s verbal games, but it hurts to think of Youji, and it’s wrong to think of him here.

“I'm sure you’ll get used to it,” Powell says – Ken doesn’t start, or turn to him. He simply lies still and gazes up at the ceiling, and listens to Powell listening to himself talk. “Yes,” the General is saying, “I am going to be keeping you alive for a while. You’re quite amusing. And while I can’t say the same for your charming go-between – she, I believe, may be able to tell me something about your little gang I don’t already know – you, at least, will probably find I am quite an easy man to satisfy. You can rest assured that I have no interest in breaking you.”

For you, Hidaka, have nothing to trade.

Finally, Ken turns his head; Powell swims into view, smirking to himself. He looks out of step with his Spartan surroundings, and too neat and too alert for the hour. (But what time is it? Late is all Ken knows: it has to be, if Powell is here and nobody is missing him.) Maybe he takes naps, or drugs.

Powell walks slowly over to him, sits beside him – he sighs low and contented, as if sinking into an armchair. He smiles down at Ken, everyone’s favorite grandfather again, and runs his fingers slow and ticklish down the plane of one of the boy’s cheeks: Ken closes his eyes, and shudders, and turns from him, and Powell strikes him sharp and sudden across the face. Ken yelps into the gag, more shocked than pained and more indignant than either. _No_ , Powell says, _don’t move_. I’ll touch you however and whenever I want, boy, and don’t imagine resisting will help: he doesn’t say that, but he doesn’t have to.

“I won’t be removing your gag, I’m afraid,” Powell says, shaking his head regretfully. “I don’t feel I can trust you not to attempt anything foolish, and I think I rather like you with your mouth closed.”

He strips Ken bare, tearing the blankets from him as if he were a present.

Ken lies stiff as a doll as Powell runs his hands over him, mute and flushed and furious, and desperately humiliated, and nothing he can do about it. (What happens barely matters: it’s his helplessness in the face of it that will drive him mad. So much for Siberian.) Don’t react, he tells himself, whatever he does don’t react—his composure shatters when Powell yanks his legs apart, thrusts two fingers roughly inside him – Jesus _fuck_ it hurts and what did you think you were here for, child? – and Ken cries out, sharp and sudden. Surges into abrupt and angry life, twisting and writhing beneath him, and Powell simply sighs and shakes his head. Thrusts the muzzle of his gun hard beneath Ken's chin and isn’t this a silly thing to die for, boy?

Ken freezes. He’s not going to shoot you, not after all this, not after he said—do you want to take the chance you’re wrong? Even here, even now, he wants to live. He still wants that! Powell flips him onto his front, presses the gun against his nape. 

“Unfortunately for you,” he says mildly, “today has been somewhat trying.”

It’s all the warning Ken gets.

It hurts this time.

Dragging the boy to his knees Powell unbuckles his pants, rubbing himself gently against Ken: the man holds himself there for a few long seconds and Ken – don’t react, you idiot! It’s what he wants – gasps soft and fractured, his eyes going wide. For a few seconds, Ken has nothing but Powell pressed lightly against him and his own hideous anticipation, the dawning realization of what is about to happen to him, and how entirely powerless he is to save himself. _Oh jesus not this, please not this, tell me he’s – mary mother of god he’s going to rape me again and there’s nothing I can_ —

Nothing to do but take it. Powell forces himself inside Ken, sudden and agonizing, and watches impassively as the boy screams into his gag. 

( _Oh God. Oh – God_.) White behind his eyes and Ken feels like he’s breaking. It hurts. Christ, it hurts! ( _I’m going to die. Oh, God, I am going to_ die—) Thoughts sticking like a broken record and he’s choking on the gag, he’s being torn apart. 

Powell fucks him hard and fast and brutal, and without enjoyment: bestial sex, sex like blinking, or scratching an itch. The buttons of the man’s suit dig painfully into his back, Powell‘s teeth scrape against the curve of his bare shoulder, nails drag against flesh. Ken screams all the way through, long, drawn-out shrieks bred of nothing but exquisite pain, caught and stifled by his gag. There’s blood before the end, and when Powell climaxes with a curse and thrusts him from him, Ken collapses onto his front, his eyes wide and agonized and utterly empty, and cries like a child.

At least it was over quickly. At least, this time, all he felt was pain.

Ken weeps, and he shivers, and Powell bends to draw the tangled blankets he lies upon over him, smoothing his hair and murmuring to him in English, nursery-rhyme nonsense Ken can barely hear and understands not at all, though he picks up the meaning well enough and he despises Powell for it. You did this, you bastard. You did this to me, how dare you tell me not to hurt— it’s absurd and it’s terrible but, somehow, this is the worst of it.

And the sting of the syringe, the pull of the drug. Powell stands, fussing with his clothing, raking a casual hand through his disordered hair as he moves to the door. He hesitates with one hand resting on the handle, turning back to regard Ken over one shoulder: Ken, unmoving, lost in despair and desperate hatred, sees nothing, but he can feel Powell’s gaze heavy upon him. He can tell that the man is smiling.

“Just remember,” Powell says, “I'm not doing this to break you.”

And snaps off the lights, and shuts the door on him.  
____

Ken wakes to hands on his shoulders, and the faces of Powell’s men, alien and closed-off as ever and all they are is – they’re just people, and barely men at all. Boys, really. Corn-fed kids from the heartland with blameless farm-boy faces, all freckles and cowlicks, hair like wheat and cheeks like apples and even they, blank-faced drones, have their human forms. Some reluctant, some sadistic, still others simply heedless: one, only one, a slight young man with cropped black hair and eyes of pale blue, makes Powell seem almost preferable. They don’t talk around him, though they used to. General’s orders, Ken guesses.

The soldiers, Ken knows, are none of them that different from him back when he was alive. They, like him, only obey. They feed him, they tend his wounds, they wash him – they fuck him, sometimes, while Powell watches, something Ken suspects is as much a punishment for the men as it is for him. All done to order. You don’t ask your hand why it acts. 

It hardly seems to matter what they might want him for, this time. Whatever it is, Ken is sure that he will hate it. They shake him awake; a hand cracks across his jaw when he tries to close his eyes again and he murmurs something semi-coherent, something stifled by his gag – the cloth and tape long since gave way to a more permanent arrangement, leather and plastic, buckles and straps. Ken is almost getting used to being unable to speak.

Used, almost, to the cuffs that bind his hands behind him, to the rattle of chain when he turns over or shifts his weight. Even the nagging, chafing collar that Powell, on the third night, pulled tight about his throat is becoming only familiar.

They strip the blankets from him, unfasten the chain from the cuff at his ankle; the (oh _god_ ) it is the courtyard, then. It is only instinct that has Ken try to struggle – and they strike him, they hold him down, and it happens anyway. Hands seize his upper arms, grasping hard enough to hurt, and Ken is dragged unceremoniously to his feet. His head slumps forward, his tangled, sweaty bangs hanging in his eyes; the cellar fades to gray before his eyes, the floor yaws beneath him like the deck of a ship in a storm and if the soldiers were to let go of him even for a second, he would fall. It’s the drugs, it’s the blood loss and the lack of food; it’s because he no longer cares. 

One of them, stocky and blonde, steps forward. Forcing Ken's head back, stubby fingers twisting painfully in his hair, he ties a length of rope to the ring at Ken’s collar, gives it two brisk tugs which leave the boy coughing. The coarse, heavy fabric of his issued clothing feels rough and strange where it brushes against Ken's skin. If it weren’t for the gag, he would bite.

It’s only now he remembers he is naked; it’s only now he feels a sudden pang of desperate humiliation. Ken blushes.

It doesn’t matter when he’s by himself. It doesn’t even matter with Powell, not really. Now?

The courtyard, then. Don’t do this, he wants to say – and, ready or not, they drag him from the room. Ken pulls against them, dragging back against the hands that hold him: it feels, almost, like rebellion. A rifle butt to the back drives him forward. He stumbles as they reach the stairway, feels the soldiers heft his weight, half-carrying him up the stairs and out, out into the night, crisp and pretty as a Christmas card, the sky clogged with fat flakes of snow. The door slams behind him, and he feels his insides give a sudden sickening twist. Feels like he’s falling.

Now, collared and bound and gagged, trapped behind the wire, he stands in the courtyard in fresh-fallen snow, surrounded by soldiers in greatcoats and heavy boots – even the hands about his arms are gloved. Stark naked, shivering uncontrollably, Ken doesn’t want to die but he wishes, quite fervently, that he were dead.

They lead Ken to the cyclone fence, force him to his knees. The same barrel-chested blonde ties the other end of the rope at his collar to the fence, and steps away. Ken raises his head, blinks blearily out through the mesh at the world beyond it – thinks once again of Aya. (Thinks, I'm sorry.) Our laws, Aya said, have no meaning there… Even if anyone saw, what could they do? How close they are to Japan, and how impossibly far away. He wishes he’d told Aya he cared.

How white the snow looks; it looks as if it should be warm. It lies.

Somewhere, he hears water, hissing from a spigot and plashing to the concrete and Ken feels as if he has been caught in a twisted take on a snow globe. The flakes drift lazily around him, the fallen snow he kneels upon insinuates itself about his feet and legs, his thighs – and cold, so cold it burns his skin. Ken closes his eyes, and braces himself.

Don’t do this, he wants to say. Please: he hates the fact he wants to plead. Please, _please_ , don’t do this to me—

The cold makes him gasp.

( _You’re a mess, Ken_ , Powell had said that first time, running one hand across his hip and down the length of his bare thigh – blood dried across his body and caked in his hair, skin a patchwork of bruising and sour with stale sweat, Powell’s semen spattering his thighs, he had felt every inch of it. _We’ve got to do something about that… take him away, and clean him off_. It was midwinter, the middle of the night; Powell’s men dragged Ken into the courtyard, and tied him to the fence, and turned a hose on him – all the while the General watched, detached and dispassionate, as if watching children play some rough game. As if he were contemplating intervening. It had nothing whatever to do with him.)

The hose plays across his head, his chest, dragging slowly down the length of his body until it is trained between Ken’s legs, making him gasp and try to cover himself, to shrink away from the water. It’s so cold it burns him, brings tears to his eyes. So cold he can barely breathe.

Footsteps; the soft, slightly jarring _squeak_ and _scrunch_ of boots on new snow. The blonde steps beside him, crouching, placing a cake of yellow soap down in the snow, and wetting a washcloth in the stream of the hose.

 _Please don’t_ —it’s not even worth thinking it. The soap smells foul and strong and abruptly chemical, as always. As always, they scrub too hard: he tells himself that, this time, he won’t make a sound, but the blonde is beside him and the washcloth is at his face, the man’s stubby fingers pressing hard against his bruised cheeks, his jaw, the back of his neck, rubbing quick and brutal as a nursemaid seeking a small revenge on a too-fractious charge. Ken whimpers into the gag: it’s as close as he’ll get to admitting how much he is hurting.

So he cringes, he tries to pull away, fight free – anything. Anything at all, as long as he’s not just sitting there enduring—two swift, stinging blows to the face and Ken stills. Lets them wash him down. The soap stings his eyes, droplets of water crawl down the length of his spine. He hasn’t felt so lost, or so utterly helpless, since he was a child.

And, as they drag him back to his feet and lead him, soaked and shivering, back through the snow-veiled courtyard and down into the tiny basement room that has become his cell, Ken tells himself that the cold is making his eyes smart.  
____

Later, much later – how much later Ken cannot tell. Hours. Days, maybe. He’s still cold.

Powell has been. Sat and talked at him in English, and casually raped him, and left again – Ken had gazed blankly at the ceiling over his pinstriped shoulder, and waited for it to be over. It hurt and he hated it but it no longer seemed to matter very much. Powell kissed his brow as he jabbed the needle into his arm.

The drugs aren’t working so well any more. They don’t make him sleep; he just drifts.

Waiting. He waits for his solitude to be broken; he waits for his tormenters to tire of him, and to leave him alone again. Ken is waiting to die. He wonders if he is going crazy, and how he is supposed to be able to tell. This is what he has come to. Just boredom and isolation, and terror, and hard to tell which is worse when the unbearable loneliness is relieved only by the periodic visits of his torturers.

It can't, Ken thinks, last forever.

(This is correct. One way or another this situation will end, there will be an _afterwards_. It's only a matter of when, and of how. This may be all he has left to him, but it will end someday and life will go on. It makes no difference whose life it is, except to its owner. Just because it's personal doesn't mean it matters.)

Ken wonders when this all started. Days ago, that is all he is certain of, but how many he can't tell. He can't even begin to guess. There's no pattern to anything that happens to him, or maybe there is and he, between the fever-dreams and whatever junk they’ve been dosing him with, the hours spent trapped somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, is simply too dazed and pained and weary of it all to see it. Or maybe he simply hasn't been here long enough. But Ken can't remember how long he has been here, and he can't see how it matters anyway. It's not like he has anywhere else to be. There is nobody to miss him.

He just can't remember, that's all.

He can't even remember how many times he has been raped.

_-to be continued_


End file.
